Getting away with it

Julie Cohen was born in the U.S.A. and brought up in the mountains of western Maine. There wasn't much going on in Maine, so she made stuff up. She spent most of her childhood with her nose in a book and wrote her first novel at age eleven, a fantasy story about a female teenage wizard. In high school, she and her best friend wrote wildly improbable romances about their favourite rock stars. At university she wrote newspaper features and a weekly cartoon strip about an Elvis look-alike with a pet squid. She spent a year studying at Cambridge University in England, and fell in love with the country and the sexy accents. After attaining her first degree in English literature, she moved to England and researched fairies in children's literature for a postgraduate degree. She started writing funny, sexy stories in her spare time. She started writing her first Harlequin romance on a blueberry farm in Maine, and finished it on a beach in Greece. This one, and several others, collected rejection letters. Shortly after placing in the finals in the Romance Writers of America's Golden Heart contest, she sold to Harlequin Mills & Boon. Julie lives in the south of England with her husband and her son, and still reads everything in sight. Her other hobbies include walking, travelling, listening to loud music, watching films and eating far too much popcorn. She is teased daily about her American accent. Visit her Web site and write to her at julie@julie-cohen.com